Linda pursed her gray-pink lips. “I—”
“Don’t interrupt me.”
The force of Vern’s scolding made Linda flinch.
“Hear this. The days are coming when your willful ignorance will no longer be rewarded,” said Vern, and shut the door in the woman’s face.
Temporarily safe from Linda’s foolishness, Vern relaxed her muscles. The day had wrung her dry, and solitude beckoned like a lover.
Vern switched on the overhead light—and switched it off again. Privacy was a gift the fungus was not going to grant her tonight.
A woman lay curled and prone on the concave mattress, bile-green bedspread pulled over herself as she muttered a prayer in Spanish. “A ti clamamos los desterrados hijos de Eva,” she said. Despite their foreignness, Vern understood the words.
To you we cry, banished children of Eve.
In the window, a teenager hung from a noose made from curtain pulls. It still left Vern stricken at times, the casual way the past flashed back to life in these harrowing glimpses.
“Fuck this,” she said, and shut herself in the bathroom. She turned the water as hot as it would go and heeded Linda’s advice to hop right in.
The drownt child gurgled for breath as water pooled into the poorly draining tub, but at least he was the devil Vern knew.
The day ran off of Vern’s skin in rivulets. Blood and sweat had mixed with dirt to form an itchy paste all over her, but it was no match for the water. She remained under the showerhead long after the water turned lukewarm, then cool, then cold. She sat on the toilet to dry herself off and dressed in the jacket and shorts.
Vern braced as she opened the bathroom door, but when she turned on the light, she was alone. She fell back into the bed in short-lived relief. The telltale prickle of an invading presence brushed her skin.
Next to her, a body appeared in the bed, cool and stiff. On the other side of her, another. Cold sloughed off the corpses’ ashen and blue-tinged skin.
“I thought I was done. Please, not tonight,” Vern begged, but the dead were fixtures of Vern’s horizon, wishing them away no less futile than bidding away her skin, her eyeballs, her own two feet.
The bodies turned solitude into loneliness. Vern’s family was who-knew-where, and her only company was cadavers. She closed her eyes as hard as she could and prayed for sleep. Ten minutes later, the bodies still lay stiff beside her.
Were she back at the cabin, Gogo would distract her by reading aloud. Bridget would make her food. The children would stack books like blocks into structures, and liven the space with their antics.
The cabin had become a home. Vital Springs Inn was a coffin.
Vern the grabbed phone she’d stolen off Linda out of her pocket and dialed Gogo. She didn’t answer the first time, so Vern rang again.
“What?” Gogo barked upon answering, knowing it was Vern.
Cautiously, Vern tilted her head to either side to see if her grim companions remained. They did, and this time when she looked, they looked back, their corpses rotated onto their sides to face her whichever way she turned.
“Vern?” asked Gogo. “You okay?”
Vern’s breaths quivered out of her. What secret, dark memory would the dead enact on her body tonight? Unfastened from the mortal coil, the beings that walked the haunting realm were as infants in their concern only for self. Only impulse drove them.
“Vern? Vern?” asked Gogo.
Vern gathered the nerve to speak. “I got company,” she whispered. “Two dead bodies.”
She couldn’t disguise the tremble in her voice. It had been some time since she’d had to endure the hauntings alone, without Gogo by her side talking her down. “They’re so damn cold.”
Through the window, she heard Linda and Michelle fighting, Violet-Grace singing a pop song about all we do is break up then make up, what we need is a shake up, out of key. None of it drowned out the haunting.
“Tell me their names,” said Gogo.
“Their names?”
“Of the bodies. Who are they?”
Vern had never thought about the names of the people she saw. She closed her eyes, searching. “Peter,” she said, “and Samuel.” The names were right there, just past the surface of the hauntings. Vern’s eyebrows rose in surprise as the specifics of their lives filled her. “They were lovers,” she announced triumphantly, pleased by her mastery of the fungus.
For ages, she’d been trying to exert more control over them as Gogo had encouraged, but progress was middling and variable. Seeing Queen in all her unhinged glory must’ve loosened the necessary screws inhibiting Vern from advancing.